#IMPACT URGENCY PRIORITY MATRIX EXCEL HOW TO#

The matrix is a tool so you know how to categorize incidents. The SLA and SLO’s under each item are also customizable. These are guidelines for best practices but are completely customizable. I want to say that the descriptions of urgency and impact can be determined by you. Those make up the Service Level Agreements (SLA) or Service Level Objectives (SLO) for the Priority of the incident. Let’s look deeper into the matrix within each Priority block, you can see a response and resolution time. That is up to you to decide if that is the case for you and your business. As you can see from this matrix, any enterprise wide outage automatically coincides to a Priority 1 – Critical incident.

If there is a complete loss of services to 6+ users and they cannot perform work, there needs to be urgency around getting the issue resolved. Taking the examples above, if you look at the urgency of high across the top and follow that down to the Impact of High, you can see the box is red and shows Priority 1 – Critical. The below graphic is an incident priority matrix. You may say, that doesn’t make any sense, can you show me. If the impact is Medium and the urgency is High, the Priority of the Ticket is Priority 2 – High. If the impact is High and the urgency is High, the Priority of the ticket is Priority 1 – Critical. Priority is determined by using impact and urgency values which equate to the priority value. High: Either complete loss of all services to 1 – 5 users or partial loss of service to 6+ users.Medium: Partial loss of service impacting 2 – 5 users (site).Low: No loss of service or impacting 1 user (user).Ask yourself, how important is the service and to what degree is the business affected? Impact is also measured in terms of low, medium, and high. Impact is a measure of the how wide spread the service disruption is to the requester. High: User cannot perform work, service or major portion of a service is unavailable (Cannot Work).Medium: Issue prevents user from performing a portion of their duties/functions (Slow or reduced functions).Low: Issue does not affect user from performing their duties/function (Annoyance).The possible values of urgency are low, medium, and high. If a time clock system goes down before the start of work on Wednesday, that is probably a high urgency, but if that same system goes down on a Saturday morning for a company that does zero work over the weekend, the urgency is probably not as high. The speed at which the issue needs to be addressed. How urgently (quickly) the business needs the work done. Urgency is a measure of a business criticality as communicated by the requester, generally defined on a time basis. The first thing that must be done is determine the incidents urgency and impact which will then equate to the incidents priority. The incident priority scale is generally 1 – 5.Īn incident priority matrix is a tool to help determine an incidents priority based on the urgency and impact.

Impact urgency priority matrix excel